1.The problem isn’t ‘ignorance’. The problem is the mind you have right now. (H.H. Karmapa XVII @NYC 2/4/18)2. I support Mingyur R and HHDL in their positions against lama abuse.3. Student: Lama, I thought I might die but then I realized that the 3 Jewels would protect me. Lama: Even If you had died the 3 Jewels would still have protected you. (DW post by Fortyeightvows)

Serious tensions in southern Italy: first looting in supermarkets and calls for rebellion

The health emergency is also becoming, as feared, a social emergency in southern Italy: Fearful social protests are feared and the first looting has begun, forcing supermarkets to equip themselves with special surveillance. A cry of alarm emerges strongly from the south, echoed by Italian mayors and Italian intelligence services warning the government: “The people are hungry.” The signals are many and dramatic, turning viral in a few hours. One of them is a video of a father and his daughter biting a slice of bread with Nutella; In a threatening tone he addresses Prime Minister Conte and the Mayor of Palermo in a threatening tone: “If my daughter will not be able to eat a piece of bread, we will storm the supermarkets.”

I am unsure about the quality/veracity of the source.

"My religion is not deceiving myself."Jetsun Milarepa 1052-1135 CE

"Butchers, prostitutes, those guilty of the five most heinous crimes, outcasts, the underprivileged: all are utterly the substance of existence and nothing other than total bliss."The Supreme Source - The Kunjed Gyalpo
The Fundamental Tantra of Dzogchen Semde

Everything is going virtual, which is great for everyone who does not work with their hands, like jobs that mainly do stuff on software. Whereas laborers and professionals who require in-person interactions like doctors. I imagine the latter will invest heavily in robots or medical drones. The former, especially in the developing world will have to rely on socialism to survive or there will be blood. That is just the sad truth.

Serious tensions in southern Italy: first looting in supermarkets and calls for rebellion

The health emergency is also becoming, as feared, a social emergency in southern Italy: Fearful social protests are feared and the first looting has begun, forcing supermarkets to equip themselves with special surveillance. A cry of alarm emerges strongly from the south, echoed by Italian mayors and Italian intelligence services warning the government: “The people are hungry.” The signals are many and dramatic, turning viral in a few hours. One of them is a video of a father and his daughter biting a slice of bread with Nutella; In a threatening tone he addresses Prime Minister Conte and the Mayor of Palermo in a threatening tone: “If my daughter will not be able to eat a piece of bread, we will storm the supermarkets.”

I am unsure about the quality/veracity of the source.

In counter insurgency school 20% unemployment was the point where winning is impossible. It's also when things are so unstable you can foment a revolution with just sparks. Syrian farmers were a great example. It's one of the main reasons we use sanctions in economic warfare. You will see many countries mobilizing the army soon in a manner that seems oddly late/ineffective for controlling the spread of the virus. Borders will stay closed and control of media will become very severe in many countries you did not expect. The global intelligence community is gearing up for unlimited over time. This chance to destabilize the big players will not come again soon and these lunatics cannot stop themselves.

In counter insurgency school 20% unemployment was the point where winning is impossible. It's also when things are so unstable you can foment a revolution with just sparks.

Well, they had better revise the books at counter-insurgency school. There are plenty of countries where the unemployment rate is over 20% (including Greece, which went well over the 20% mark) that have not had revolutions. Nor does it look like they will have a revolution any time soon.

Revolution needs more than a high unemployment rate, it needs an organised and armed alternative. It needs people ready to sacrifice themselves for a higher cause.

In highly individualised post-modern capitalist societies the second factor is missing.

In Greece, not only did we not have a revolution, but they recently reelected into power the very people who's policies where one of the causal factors for the mass unemployment.

"My religion is not deceiving myself."Jetsun Milarepa 1052-1135 CE

"Butchers, prostitutes, those guilty of the five most heinous crimes, outcasts, the underprivileged: all are utterly the substance of existence and nothing other than total bliss."The Supreme Source - The Kunjed Gyalpo
The Fundamental Tantra of Dzogchen Semde

In counter insurgency school 20% unemployment was the point where winning is impossible. It's also when things are so unstable you can foment a revolution with just sparks.

Well, they had better revise the books at counter-insurgency school. There are plenty of countries where the unemployment rate is over 20% (including Greece, which went well over the 20% mark) that have not had revolutions. Nor does it look like they will have a revolution any time soon.

Revolution needs more than a high unemployment rate, it needs an organised and armed alternative. It needs people ready to sacrifice themselves for a higher cause.

In highly individualised post-modern capitalist societies the second factor is missing.

In Greece, not only did we not have a revolution, but they recently reelected into power the very people who's policies where one of the causal factors for the mass unemployment.

Didn't filthy socialists take over the entire country? The Golden Dawn were just some very nice misunderstood gentlemen who were not literal Nazis. Now right wing assholes are murdering the poor and refugees again. But yes Greece has been very stable and the mortality rates for the poor are perfectly normal. It's only increased by 1 per 1000 or 10k per year since 2008.

Shimura Ken just passed away, due to COVID-19 related pneumonia. He was a very famous and popular Japanese comedian and TV celebrity. He turned 70 in February. This might serve as a wake-up call to some Japanese people, to take this disease a lot more serious.

"The Guru is the Buddha, the Guru is the Dharma,
The Guru is the Sangha too,
The Guru is Śrī Heruka.
The All-Creating King is the Guru."
-- The Secret Assembly Tantra

How do neoliberal governments act in emergency situations when the interests of the private sector top their agenda?

...For many critics of the European Union's neoliberal austerity measures, the lockdowns in Italy and Spain are, in fact, glaring revelations of the weaknesses of a free market economy, the overreliance on the private sector, and overwhelmed healthcare systems.

On March 16, the same day that the Spanish government decided to nationalise all private hospitals, the whole world watched the footage of a woman crying inconsolably outside a hospital in Madrid. Her husband had just died from COVID-19 and she herself had also tested positive. But the woman had been turned away from the hospital because she was reportedly "not sick enough" to be treated under these emergency circumstances.

The state of exception decides which citizens' lives are worth saving and which ones are not. Paradoxically, the moment at which that decision is taken lays bare the neoliberal state's incapacity to save and care for most of its citizens.

..COVID-19 has, therefore, ushered in a US state of exception that is internally split, one in which the imperative to save lives through quarantining (in the face of a broken healthcare system and a completely collapsed welfare structure) is jostling against the inclination to do everything possible to revive the financial market...

But the woman had been turned away from the hospital because she was reportedly "not sick enough" to be treated under these emergency circumstances.

If the healthcare system is being overwhelmed by treating the 5% of infected people that are having severe symptoms, doesn’t it make sense to send somebody home that has a mild case? What other course of action do the writers suggest?

1.The problem isn’t ‘ignorance’. The problem is the mind you have right now. (H.H. Karmapa XVII @NYC 2/4/18)2. I support Mingyur R and HHDL in their positions against lama abuse.3. Student: Lama, I thought I might die but then I realized that the 3 Jewels would protect me. Lama: Even If you had died the 3 Jewels would still have protected you. (DW post by Fortyeightvows)

A couple of articles that make a perhaps mundane but important point, one that our friend Nemo has been making for a while now which is supported by the data: that the virus is both more infective and less lethal than is commonly believed. These two are obviously connected: if we're undercounting cases (and research from Hubei suggests that 60-80% of cases aren't diagnosed because they they didn't show symptoms and were therefore never tested) then the total mortality, not the case-based mortality, is much lower than the 1-2% numbers people cite.

When a handful of Dutch health workers fell ill days after the Netherlands’ first Covid-19 case, it prompted mass screening at two hospitals. What scientists found surprised them. Some 1,353 hospital staff in Breda and Tilburg, who recently suffered typical winter coughs and sniffles, were tested for the coronavirus. Of those, 86 -- or 6.4% -- were positive. Barely half had a fever, and the majority reported working while they were mildly ill.

At first, we were desperately short on supplies. But we moved quickly to figure out a response. We focused on equipment—masks, respirators, negative-pressure machines. Because this is an infectious disease, you need to move the air inside a hospital room to the outside. We only had 30 negative-pressure hospital beds in all of Daegu, and some of those were in use. But we secured a few hundred more in coordination with the national government and the military.
We used dorms and similar facilities to set up 5,500 hospital beds. To staff them, we needed medical personnel in commensurate numbers. We met that need through volunteers. I’m the director of a clinic, but I took a month’s leave, without pay, to come here and work.
The drive-through testing that the US is currently replicating—a professor in Incheon had proposed the concept but never tested it. On February 21, a colleague called me and said, “The testing is taking too long. What if we try it this way?” I said, “OK, why don’t you come to our meeting tomorrow?” They briefed us the following day, and on February 23 we opened our first drive-through testing station. ...
The key to keeping mortality low is very quickly differentiating between mild and severe forms of the virus. Those who are young or have no underlying disease should be separated from those who are older or have an underlying disease, and this latter group must be tested and given a chest x-ray as a matter of course. There is one category of young people, in their 40s or younger, who are asymptomatic but lose their sense of smell or taste. They should be examined for the coronavirus.
The UK offers a cautionary tale. Its first response was to say that people would develop herd immunity, though it switched course a few days later. I’d already been concerned about the capacity of the British system, and this made me very worried. Herd immunity only works if you have a vaccine and 85 to 90 percent of the population is inoculated. Right now, in the face of an infectious disease with such a high mortality rate, for the UK to resist acknowledging the reality of the virus could translate into tens of thousands of deaths. It was unthinkable for a government to put out such nonsense. We in Korea were thinking, “Are these people in their right mind?”

The data on Covid-19 differs wildly from country to country. Look at the figures for Italy and Germany. At the time of writing, Italy has 69,176 recorded cases and 6,820 deaths, a rate of 9.9 per cent. Germany has 32,986 cases and 157 deaths, a rate of 0.5 per cent. Do we think that the strain of virus is so different in these nearby countries as to virtually represent different diseases? Or that the populations are so different in their susceptibility to the virus that the death rate can vary more than twentyfold? If not, we ought to suspect systematic error, that the Covid-19 data we are seeing from different countries is not directly comparable.
Look at other rates: Spain 7.1 per cent, US 1.3 per cent, Switzerland 1.3 per cent, France 4.3 per cent, South Korea 1.3 per cent, Iran 7.8 per cent. We may very well be comparing apples with oranges. Recording cases where there was a positive test for the virus is a very different thing to recording the virus as the main cause of death.

The Italian issue still bothers me. The only two explanations we can offer for the high apparent case-based mortality in Italy are (A) less testing than elsewhere, or (B) older/weaker population. (B) is probably partially true, Italy has bad demographics, but would it make that much difference? I find (A) hard to believe, but published data on testing in Italy is limited.

A couple of articles that make a perhaps mundane but important point, one that our friend Nemo has been making for a while now which is supported by the data: that the virus is both more infective and less lethal than is commonly believed. These two are obviously connected: if we're undercounting cases (and research from Hubei suggests that 60-80% of cases aren't diagnosed because they they didn't show symptoms and were therefore never tested) then the total mortality, not the case-based mortality, is much lower than the 1-2% numbers people cite.

When a handful of Dutch health workers fell ill days after the Netherlands’ first Covid-19 case, it prompted mass screening at two hospitals. What scientists found surprised them. Some 1,353 hospital staff in Breda and Tilburg, who recently suffered typical winter coughs and sniffles, were tested for the coronavirus. Of those, 86 -- or 6.4% -- were positive. Barely half had a fever, and the majority reported working while they were mildly ill.

At first, we were desperately short on supplies. But we moved quickly to figure out a response. We focused on equipment—masks, respirators, negative-pressure machines. Because this is an infectious disease, you need to move the air inside a hospital room to the outside. We only had 30 negative-pressure hospital beds in all of Daegu, and some of those were in use. But we secured a few hundred more in coordination with the national government and the military.
We used dorms and similar facilities to set up 5,500 hospital beds. To staff them, we needed medical personnel in commensurate numbers. We met that need through volunteers. I’m the director of a clinic, but I took a month’s leave, without pay, to come here and work.
The drive-through testing that the US is currently replicating—a professor in Incheon had proposed the concept but never tested it. On February 21, a colleague called me and said, “The testing is taking too long. What if we try it this way?” I said, “OK, why don’t you come to our meeting tomorrow?” They briefed us the following day, and on February 23 we opened our first drive-through testing station. ...
The key to keeping mortality low is very quickly differentiating between mild and severe forms of the virus. Those who are young or have no underlying disease should be separated from those who are older or have an underlying disease, and this latter group must be tested and given a chest x-ray as a matter of course. There is one category of young people, in their 40s or younger, who are asymptomatic but lose their sense of smell or taste. They should be examined for the coronavirus.
The UK offers a cautionary tale. Its first response was to say that people would develop herd immunity, though it switched course a few days later. I’d already been concerned about the capacity of the British system, and this made me very worried. Herd immunity only works if you have a vaccine and 85 to 90 percent of the population is inoculated. Right now, in the face of an infectious disease with such a high mortality rate, for the UK to resist acknowledging the reality of the virus could translate into tens of thousands of deaths. It was unthinkable for a government to put out such nonsense. We in Korea were thinking, “Are these people in their right mind?”

The data on Covid-19 differs wildly from country to country. Look at the figures for Italy and Germany. At the time of writing, Italy has 69,176 recorded cases and 6,820 deaths, a rate of 9.9 per cent. Germany has 32,986 cases and 157 deaths, a rate of 0.5 per cent. Do we think that the strain of virus is so different in these nearby countries as to virtually represent different diseases? Or that the populations are so different in their susceptibility to the virus that the death rate can vary more than twentyfold? If not, we ought to suspect systematic error, that the Covid-19 data we are seeing from different countries is not directly comparable.
Look at other rates: Spain 7.1 per cent, US 1.3 per cent, Switzerland 1.3 per cent, France 4.3 per cent, South Korea 1.3 per cent, Iran 7.8 per cent. We may very well be comparing apples with oranges. Recording cases where there was a positive test for the virus is a very different thing to recording the virus as the main cause of death.

The Italian issue still bothers me. The only two explanations we can offer for the high apparent case-based mortality in Italy are (A) less testing than elsewhere, or (B) older/weaker population. (B) is probably partially true, Italy has bad demographics, but would it make that much difference? I find (A) hard to believe, but published data on testing in Italy is limited.

I hid in my bunker the day after Valentines expecting up to a 4% case fatality rate. The army made me rather cold and calculating when it comes to the math which saves many lives when the dead start piling up.The problem is where the math takes you. Clearly China lied to cover up when this started by upping the fatality rate. It's obvious there will be a reckoning when this is over. Expect absolute lockdown in China with foreigners expelled and communication blocked.

The R0 for this bug must be ridiculous. Somewhere between 3.5-7. It found every vulnerable person in Italy in 60 days. 99.2% of fatalities have at least one preexisting major morbidity and 48.5% 3 or more. I pegged China's lying at 90% of cases unreported and Oxford is now saying 86% so the math was close.That put the fatality rate close to the line where shutting down the economy kills as many from cuts to medical care, suicide, poor nutrition, etc over a 3 year period. That is the scary part. If the R0 is 4+ containment was impossible. Fatality rate looks near to 0.4% with an annual of 0.77%(global, USA 0.83%) baseline. As you can see from Italy there is a lot of crossover in these 2 groups. Bad flu is 0.2% over roughly a year, R0 of 1.2 to 1.4, herd immunity at the end. Covid 19 is looking like 0.4% but smashed into 90 days with an R0 around 4, probable herd immunity at the end. 3 months of hell then it's over. The second financial disaster may be unnecessary.

I sounded the alarm because it is clear the oligarchs around the world want to use this as an excuse to loot, retool the entire economy, automate, downsize, start wars and with only a slight exaggeration commit genocide against the poor and vulnerable.

If this is verified the least harm route would have been isolating the entire vulnerable population for 4 months while we got sick and went about our business.

Last edited by Nemo on Mon Mar 30, 2020 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.